Jon Aquino's Mental Garden

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Tuesday, July 04, 2006

Useful jEdit plugin: XML (HTML) Indenter. And switching back to jEdit from UltraEdit.

Found a useful jEdit plugin called XML Indenter. It does one thing simply and well: it does a bit of indenting on messy HTML. Not as intrusive as HTML Tidy (which is certainly useful in many cases).

Well, I may be going back to jEdit. UltraEdit, while fast, doesn't seem to have a way to easily find matching HTML tags. It also doesn't have a good Highlight Occurrences function. And it doesn't have a set of preset color schemes to choose from.


posted by Jonathan at 7/04/2006 02:30:00 p.m.

11 Comments:

  • I'm not following your blog for long (got here through your wonderful command line thing), so I don't know your requirements for an editor, but do you know pspad? http://www.pspad.com/en/

    it's come a long way, and it's free

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 7/05/2006 5:27 a.m.  

  • Hi kerray--I tried it before and found that the window would open in a collapsed state (50x20), but that's probably just my computer. I'll download it and try again.

    By Blogger Jonathan, at 7/05/2006 9:07 a.m.  

  • The snag for me with jEdit is that it is so slowwww to start up. I can't get beyond that.

    I used to use UltraEdit on Windows but I'm not sure I could live with it after all amazing movement commands of vim. Without a "delete until next {char}" an editor is useless!

    I am having editor dilemmas at the moment - cream vs vim vs emacs vs scite. Maybe I'll have another look at jedit.

    By Blogger Thomas David Baker, at 7/14/2006 8:52 a.m.  

  • hi bakert -- yeah, jEdit is fully-featured, but it is a tad sluggish sometimes--but for me it's worth it. If you have a speedy computer it shouldn't be a problem. It's like emacs for the 21st century--sometimes it is just less tiring on the brain to have a gui (e.g. for sftp, code folding, etc.)

    scite is pretty good--just has some annoying things about it like no macro capability and it beeps at you if the cursor is in the incremental search box.

    By Blogger Jonathan, at 7/16/2006 10:12 a.m.  

  • More things I like about jEdit:

    - ability to set up a backup directory. I've set mine to c:\jeditbackups, and set the max backups to 100

    Hm...unfortunately it doesn't seem to back up files accessed via sftp.

    By Blogger Jonathan, at 7/16/2006 11:47 p.m.  

  • I gave jedit a proper go (changed to GTK look and feel, made the fonts look right, read some documentation). It seems to stay memory resident so only the first start up is slow. And it's not as slow as I remembered (about 2 seconds on my laptop).

    In fact, jedit fulfils /almost/ all my needs. I'm going to have to find a way to do "delete until char" and "delete until search result" which are two incredibly useful features of vim. But it is a joy to have Ctrl-c, Ctrl-x, Ctrl-v, Ctrl-z, Ctrl-a back (but why isn't Redo Ctrl-y?)

    The only thing is perhaps the fundamental structure of jedit is not as powerful as vim with it's concepts of movement and action? "Delete until char" and "delete until search result" may just be symptoms of this way of thinking rather than the only two features I want to take with me.

    Other than that my only quibble is that it has crashed twice this morning. I'm hoping that it is properly stable and this is some freak occurrence.

    Now I need to know what plugins I need to make the python/ruby/erlang support as good as it is in TextMate/emacs!

    By Blogger Thomas David Baker, at 7/23/2006 2:22 a.m.  

  • bakert--sounds like you are finding jEdit useful. Regarding "delete until char"--perhaps someone has already written a macro, or there may be a way for you to record one?

    Also you can remap anything in jEdit (so you can change Ctrl+Y to Redo if desired).

    As for me, yup I've settled on jEdit as my editor of choice for now. I haven't looked at the source code, but the thorough self-consistency tells me without a doubt that it is architected beautifully under the covers.

    By Blogger Jonathan, at 7/23/2006 8:04 p.m.  

  • More good jEdit stuff: Highlight All Occurrences.

    By Blogger Jonathan, at 10/26/2006 6:09 p.m.  

  • even more good stuff on jEdit:

    column editing
    remote ftp open/save
    color coding
    macro programming
    GUI

    To UltraEdit users, jEdit can do everything that UltraEdit can do, except that jEdit is free!

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 7/25/2007 12:49 a.m.  

  • Amen, brotha.

    By Blogger Jonathan, at 7/25/2007 8:49 p.m.  

  • I like using this HTML Indenter...it seriously beautifies my HTML and makes formatting HTML super easy...If I get jacked up templates from a designer, I can just drop a directory of files on it and it produces super clean code to implement.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 1/29/2008 3:55 p.m.  

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